Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice

The adaptive immune system develops specific biological responses and maintains recognition of prior exposures over an individual’s lifetime, through antibodies and memory cells.

Typically in septic shock, a person’s body sets off intense inflammation in response to an infection or trauma. Body temperature spikes to a fever to fight the offender. It can then plunge into hypothermia as the body fails to correct the

The sum of lifetime exposures to nongenetic drivers of health and illness, from conception to death, is called the exposome.17 The exposome encompasses chemical, social, psychological, ecological, historical, political, and biological elements

Most doctors—most humans, really—have unwittingly inherited a colonial worldview that emphasizes individual health, disconnecting illness from its social and historical contexts and obscuring our place in the web of life that makes us who we are.

Acute inflammation can also be triggered by cellular injury. In this situation, damage-associated molecular

Acute inflammation can begin with an infection, when innate immune cells recognize molecular signatures found on the surface of bacteria, fungi, or viruses called pathogen-associated

Our anatomical systems are embedded in more systems—ones that humans have engineered and that make up our surrounding ecologies.

The fifteenth century saw the simultaneous inauguration of European empire and the ascendency of a scientific worldview that objectified and diminished life and the natural world.

Decolonizing is training our gaze on the origins of suffering in order to uproot them. It is the ambition to build a community of respect for the “animacy of life itself.”70